Month: May 2012

“I’m totally numb,“ Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys said bluntly, in his only interview following the death on May 4th of his bandmate Adam Yauch. Sitting in the New York office of the Beasties’ publicist, only 10 days after Yauch’s passing, Horovitz fondly recalled their lifetime together in punk, hip-hop and hijinks. He also struggled to describe his feelings after his friend’s death and admitted that healing was slow in coming. "My wife is like, ‘I want to make sure you’re getting it out.’ But then I’m walking the dog and I’ll start crying on the street.” Horovitz shook his head wearily. “It’s pretty fucking crazy.”

[Angelina] Jolie is able to attract aid to Darfur through her passion, her hard work, but ultimately through the fact that she’s the subject of a great deal of attention. While her recent films may not have attracted as much attention as her work as Lara Croft, she commands approximately 35 centiKardashians of attention.

The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

Steve discusses how the typical difference between the average of something and the best of something is typically 30%-50%. The example he uses is the difference between the average New York cab ride and the best New York cab ride. Maybe the best cab ride is 30% better than average. But the difference between an average programmer and the best programmer is more like 25:1. I think that’s exactly right and it’s certainly been borne out in my experience writing software for a living.

The comparison I like to use is poets. In high school, a class is asked to write a poem. To a person, what’s produced is mediocre garbage. Maybe there’s 1 or 2 people in the class that submit something not outright vomit-inducing, but that’s about the best you’re going to get. There are only so many Shakespeares in this world. The difference between a great programmer and a mediocre programmer is like the difference between Shakespeare and the frat boy who sat next to you in high school English.

Most non-programmers don’t get this, and tend to assume the variability among programmer ability isn’t very much, and that programmers are fungible, much like swapping out hard drives. The difference between companies that make great software and those that just make software can in a lot of cases be traced to the quality of their programmers. And the difficulty of writing software, and the associated dearth of good programmers, is why so few software companies produce anything worth anything at all.

I was pretty skeptical about this when I first heard about it, but after reading some of the articles about it and watching the project’s 8 minute introduction video, this looks like it might be the real thing.

Although American hospitals excel at saving premature infants, the United States is similar to developing countries in the percentage of mothers who give birth before their children are due, the study’s chief author noted. It does worse than any Western European country and considerably worse than Japan or the Scandinavian countries.

You hear a lot of people, especially on the right, say that the United States has the best health care in the world. I think they’re often confusing having the best doctors and hospitals, which we do have, with the best health care, which we most definitely do not.

But for a few brief years, Lyndon Johnson, once a fairly conventional Southern Democrat, constrained by his constituents and his overriding hunger for power, rose above his political past and personal limitations, to embrace and promote his boyhood dreams of opportunity and equality for all Americans. After all the years of striving for power, once he had it, he said to the American people, “I’ll let you in on a secret — I mean to use it.” And use it he did to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the open housing law, the antipoverty legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and much more.

He knew what the presidency was for: to get to people — to members of Congress, often with tricks up his sleeve; to the American people, by wearing his heart on his sleeve.

Even when we parted company over the Vietnam War, I never hated L.B.J. the way many young people of my generation came to. I couldn’t. What he did to advance civil rights and equal opportunity was too important. I remain grateful to him. L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.

Bill Clinton, reviewingThe Passage of Power, the next volume in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.